Benito Pérez Galdós

“ In one word Leon, what would you have?”
“I am going to leave Madrid. That is imperatively necessary.”
“What is the matter?”
“I do not want ... I cannot stay here; I have no comfort, no affection in my own house; I have no one to care for me, since the companion of my life, instead of surrounding me with gentleness and tenderness and fondness, has shut herself up in an icy shroud. She, in the delirium of her exaggerated pietism, and I, in the gloomy solitude of my scepticism, are not, and can never be, a sympathetic and happy pair. ”

“ How could I marry a good and worthy man? It would have been folly ... no, no, I wanted to hate some one—to hate the man who was nearest to me—whom the world would call my other half, and the church pronounce my mate. You see I longed to be wicked! In our rank of life, you know, when a girl of base instincts craves for liberty, marriage is a wide and open door. In my madness I said to myself: ‘I am rich; I will marry a fool and I shall be free;’ and I never thought of my poor father. ”

“ His deprivation of sight is almost supplied by the eyes of Marianela, who waits upon him, and goes with him in his daily wanderings about the mining country of Socartes, until he knows the whole country by heart and can when need is find his way everywhere alone. As beautiful as she is homely, he forms an ideal of her looks, based upon her devotion to him, colored by his sensitive, spiritual nature, and he loves her, or what he imagines she is, and she returns his love—with fear and trembling, for ignorant as she is she knows that she is not what he believes her to be. ”

“ You who are both rich, and moderate in your requirements—and that is as good as a double fortune—cannot conceive of the anxieties of acting this bitter comedy among scenes of vanity on the boards of poverty. You—calm and content, with no passion but for your books, superior to those ambitions which scare sleep from my pillow, and free from the slips and reverses which embitter life—you are the spoilt child of Providence; here in your own house, never besieged by creditors, never molested by intruders, in the delightful society of your wife who is a perfect angel.... Poor María! ”

“ The child still murmured softly, calling Tachana and Guru, the two children of a neighbour with whom she was in the habit of playing. Then came another fit of suffocation so violent that it surely must be the last. Pepa cried aloud:
“She is dying now ... she is dying.” She flung herself over the bed, clasping the child in her arms then, wild with grief, the wretched mother clutched at her own throat as if she would strangle herself in her delirium of woe. It was a natural semi-savage gesture, a primitive instinct of suffering with the sufferer she loved. ”

“ I am not as good as I ought to be; I do not fear God as I ought; I cannot feel ready to sacrifice my feelings to the laws to which I have been a martyr; I see now that I have been living in a world of empty dogmas, where fine words are more plentiful than good deeds, and so I say: ‘I am free, you are free....’”
“I?”
“Yes, you. For a man is free who breaks his chains. Did you not say that she had left you?”
“Yes!” A pained and doubting expression came over Leon’s features.
“No! I see that it is I—always I—who am really abandoned!” cried Pepa. “Well, so be it!” ”

“ Leon is thoroughly good and he will learn to believe; yes, he will believe. There, do you see he has turned again, but he keeps away.”
[Pg 167]
“He is very sad,” said Luis, gazing at the shadow slowly wandering up and down like a soul in torment. “He looks as if some great misfortune had crushed him; and yet he has health, he is rich, he has this world’s goods in abundance. Look at me—sick, dying, bereft of everything, poor and unknown, and yet I am happy. This evening my soul is full of peace and contentment—it is as though a strong and tender hand were lifting it up to heaven.” ”

“ And with the strange but natural revulsion of a dull persistent grief, that relieves itself by delusive flashes of bitter amusement, Leon laughed aloud.
“Indeed,” said María, a little abashed. “Your evenings are a constant vexation. They are very discreditable, for with all your discussions on politics, or music, or some invention, or perhaps on history, our house is a hotbed of atheism.”
“And it would be a hotbed of virtue if we danced and talked gossip?—No, in my drawing-room no one has ever discussed atheism nor anything approaching it. Your pure and childlike conscience may rest easy! ”

“ Our poor father does not lead the life of a Christian gentleman; our mother is wholly given up to worldly vanities; Leopoldo is a dissolute rake, sunk in wickedness; and Gustavo, though he is an energetic defender of the faith, does it with too much ostentation and more out of vainglory than from any religious zeal. They all forget that beauty, human glory, riches, honours and applause, are at last no more than food for the worms that eat our bodies, and that whatever pains they spend on anything that is not a gain to the soul, profits no one but those same horrible worms ... ”

“ The day will come when you will crave my pardon on your knees, when you will entreat me with tears to teach you how to pray; when you will fling yourself, like me, at the foot of dusty altars caring not that your hands should be dirty; when you will dress in sackcloth; live, like me, in perpetual fear of your conscience; feel that a smile, a glance, a frivolous thought is a sin; renounce all the joys of the world and find delight in incessant prayer and unwearied worship, neglecting all outward things, contemning all care of your body in perpetual penance. ”

“ Have no care for the things of earth, but only for heavenly things.... We were born together, and as our bodies have been twins, growing with one growth even before our birth, so let our souls be as one in the life to come. We will be twins to all eternity, María. Say, do you desire this? Do you long to be for ever one with me in the presence of our Father, can you desire, as I do, that our righteousness may be as that of one, and that the praises we shall sing before the throne of God may sound as one hymn? ”

“ You refuse to see! To me it would be the greatest comfort if we could save our souls together; but you will not ... you will rush on to destruction. I, so far as I am concerned, to my dying hour will never cease to say: ‘Leon, Leon, look and see.... And you laugh? But I am hardened against your laughter; God grants me such patience that I can bear to be the victim of your mockery as well as of your scorn and spite. Laugh as much as you please—laugh me to scorn! I do not care; nay, I ask it of you; my one hope, my one desire is to suffer and endure.’”
“Suffer and endure!” ”

“ Ah! reality tames us; we live to learn. Good heavens! when I think of what I have gone through for mere appearances!... Indeed Leon, I have suffered cruelly. This palace, which to others is a scene of feasting and amusement, to me is full of sorrows; there is not an object which does not bear the mark, as it were, of my sighs; there is not a spot of which I could not say: ‘Here I cried on such a day; there I thought I should die of grief.’ If I were to try to tell you all I should never come to an end. ”

“ There is no name for your behaviour to María, that angel of goodness! In the first place you assailed her with your atheism and almost broke her heart by your materialistic views. Do you think that the piety of a woman, brought up as she has been, in the true faith, is not even deserving of respect when she desires to practice it with all due fervour? Without beliefs and without faith, do you expect to govern the world or a family by the laws of an atheistical Utopia? ”

“ The scandal that has dragged my name in the mud is a just punishment,” said Pepa sadly. “And if I think of it with [Pg 299] less horror than I ought to feel, it is because there is so much, so very much to excuse part—most—the foundation of the report. You are upright, honest, steadfast—I am not. I have allowed myself to cherish feelings in my heart in opposition to my duty; I am a wicked woman, Leon; I do not deserve your love; I am guilty, and I cannot feel that delicate horror of calumny you feel.”
“Pepa, Pepa, do not talk so,” said Leon grasping her hand. ”

“ You can know nothing of this occult disgrace, Leon; you cannot know what it is to live in a house where nothing is paid for, from the carpets on the floors to the bread we eat; nor the shudder that comes over one at the sound of that recurring knell, the front door bell, announcing some doleful or insolent creditor come to claim his dues; you can have no idea of the farces that have to be played day after day by people whose name seems a guarantee of respectability and honour ”

“ His mother listened with a sigh to these seraphic aspirations, which filled her with grief and admiration as she reflected how far she was from such heights of piety. Seclusion and the intense heat had made the poor lady melancholy and despondent.
One evening when Leon was going home he said to María:
“It is nothing but a feeling of dignity, or rather a dread of ‘what people will say,’ that has kept your mother from following the others in their miserable desertion. What a hideous world we live in! But since all the rest have fled we will stay. ”

“ As it is I cannot kill her—nor divorce her; even a legal separation is out of the question. The only crime that has come between us is religion. Of what do I accuse her? Of being a bigot, a fanatic. And is that a fault?... Who can decide? Now and then with shameful sophistry it has occurred to me that I might accuse her of insanity; horrible thought! And what right have I to call any excess of pious practices insane? God alone can read hearts and determine the boundary line between piety and fanaticism. In my own soul I can declare that my wife is a fanatic ”

“ You have no genuine feelings—nothing but capricious terrors, horrible stubbornness, a barren and morose mysticism which excludes all genuine love. Nay, do not talk to me of peace, you who have turned against me, doing all you can to vex and gnaw my heart with the fangs of ferocious fanaticism; to me you are like a harpy who calls your venom by the name of Faith, and who have poisoned me with that diabolical secretion.”
“Nay,” cried María with the air of a martyr, “abuse and insult me as much as you will, but do not attack my faith ”

“ How she has changed! I saw her last week at Ugoibea, and she is a wreck, a perfect wreck! María, on the contrary has grown to a goddess. Such a head, such an air, and such style!”
“There you are right,” said Fúcar with a rather satirical smile. “María Sudre is worth looking at. I fancy the mathematician must have lost his bearings and had his head turned by her bright eyes. I should not like such a girl for a wife. Very handsome no doubt, excitable, romantic, reticent—very different from what she seems—in short I do not like her—I do not like her.” ”

“ That I should deny God and the Church, that I should turn rationalist like you, that I should read your books full of lies, that I should believe that we are all apes, that materialism is truth, that Nature is the only God, or that there is no God—all your hideous mass of heresies? Happily I have been able to escape falling into that abyss. I am pious and can believe all I ought to believe; I worship sincerely and constantly, for that is the best means of keeping faith alive and active, and of closing the soul against the entrance of any false doctrine.—I go to church too often? ”

“ In some lands the beauty of the landscape lies in smiling meadows, woods and streams, tenderly overshadowed by fleecy clouds. The views from Madrid must be sought overhead in the vast space sprinkled with suns and worlds. From Leon’s house, as evening fell, might be seen the fiery glow on the horizon reflected from the setting sun and the pleasing regularity of the landscape which seems to set no bar to the east—where the most vital events in the world’s history have taken place ”

“ And Leon, deeply agitated, broke down and was silent.
“And in this separation,” said María, “who is to blame but you? You, who by nature are obdurate to all arguments, blindly obstinate in your atheism and materialism. What have I done constantly, repeatedly, but offer terms of peace and union?”
“What can you have to offer but thorns, bitterness and repulsion? What peace but that of the grave, the peace of a perfunctory, absurd and debasing formalism. ”

“ This agony of an infant by strangulation with no possibility of relieving it, while neither science nor a mother’s love can loosen the invisible cord that is choking the baby throat—the little neck, generally as white as a lily and now as livid as a piece of dead flesh; the ebbing of a pure, blameless, loving, angelical life in the most tragical torments, with the convulsions of a strangled criminal and the misery of asphyxia, is one of the most appalling instances of the inexorable fate which, whether it be for trial or for punishment, oppresses humanity. ”

“ There is not an idiot in the country who will not talk to you of agriculture. I should like them to tell me what agriculture you can have without irrigation, how you can have irrigation without rivers, or rivers without forests, or forests without men to plant them and look after them—and how are you going to get men when there are no crops? It is a vicious circle from which there is no issue—no escape! My dear Marquis, it is a matter of race I tell you.—It is one of the few things which are of the nature of primary truth: the fatality of inheritance. ”

“ And there is my father with two friends who are getting in with them.—Now, I ask you—what can such folly lead to in a man who ought to remember his age and his duties, the state of his household and his own social position? That mania for remaining young is the ruin of modern society.—Well, if you do not go away be as much as you can with my mother and Luis. My mother has a soft heart and this misfortune has come upon her like a warning from Heaven—a warning that she should cease to regard this life as one long scene of amusement. ”

“ He never excused himself from the methodically dull routine of the life of the wealthy classes in the Spanish capital and he might be seen with his wife in the fashionable employment of “taking a drive”—a pleasure which consists in going at a fixed hour to a particular avenue and gently jolting to and fro in single file, one carriage behind another and close together, at a regular pace, so that the ladies who lounge in the landaus feel the hot breath of the horses just behind them, while the quadrupeds, mistaking the flowers in their bonnets for real ones, try to make a mouthful of them. ”